


"There are prettier sights in the world"

by AlbieGeorge



Category: Cricket RPF
Genre: A very fluffy undemanding little scene, AlbieGeorge's adventures in fluff, And Woakesy is alarmingly naked, Fuckbuddies, In which Finny is clumsy and gets into a fight with a pot of hair gel, M/M, Oh look another unusual Finny pairing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2019-02-26 10:15:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13233597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlbieGeorge/pseuds/AlbieGeorge
Summary: A little fluffy explanation of why, in the midst of a routine post-match interview, naked Woakesy is foremost in Steven Finn's mind.





	"There are prettier sights in the world"

**Author's Note:**

> **WARNING** You need to have watched [this interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2cLU-Dp6Ow) before reading this in order for it to make any sense whatsoever.
> 
> Also, Woakesy shaving his ankles is a real thing, not just my weird imagination. I can't find the proof now, but I think it was in that same interview where he revealed that Jonny Bairstow shaves his legs (!).
> 
> Set on the 5th day of the England vs Pakistan test at Edgbaston in August 2016.
> 
> Rated mature, but not really that rude. I'm working up to writing porn. Honestly. Perhaps.
> 
> This is the first cricket fic I ever wrote, so it's oddly fitting that it's two of my favourite boys, even though they're not a usual ship of mine.

"Oops."

If he had been a bird rather than a bowler, Steven Finn once mused, this would be his call.  Not his mating call (that was quite another matter), just his normal, everyday squawk.  The call that middle-aged men in beige with binoculars waited quietly in hides to hear, that David Attenborough would talk in hushed tones about as a leggy, accident prone creature with a huge black crest thundered through the undergrowth in the back of shot.

This particularly fine example of the Finn-bird's call had escaped his lips before the pot of whatever hair product was fashionable this month had hit the floor, artfully depositing most of its contents around the bathroom, a pale blue Jackson Pollock-like splodge of goop landing in the hair above his right ankle.  He grimaced slightly at the sudden coldness of it, summoning the energy to pick up the container, bracing himself for the small twinges of pain the manoeuvre would bring.  The plight of a fast bowler on the morning of day five of a test match.  If he was honest, though, the pain was welcome.  It meant that he was bowling.

_Bowling for England.  In a test.  Brilliant._

This small, contented thought bubble was punctured by a familiar voice.  Amiable.  Smiling, if a voice could be smiling.  It could, decided Steve, as this voice was often smiling.  Brummie enough to be charming, but not enough to be comical.

"You going to pick that up, or are you thinking of making a matching quiff for your ankle hair?"

Steve looked round, in the way that only a man whose feet are frozen in place by the danger of slipping on hair gel can.  Carefully.  The man that owned the smiling voice was indeed smiling, sitting up in bed with his shoulders against the headboard, his hands clasped behind his head.  All eye crinkles, pink cheeks and straight white teeth, one of the hands had already smoothed his short fair hair into its usual motionless perfection.

_Time for a witty retort, Finn._

"Well, at least I have ankle hair to style."

Truth be told, shaving off his ankle hair to avoid it catching in the strapping he played in was about the only weird thing about Chris Woakes, a man so normal and inconspicuous you could forget he was in the dressing room until he plopped down beside you and suddenly you'd been friends for years.

_Mediocre ankle hair-based bants.  Obvious, but not bad.  6/10._

Chris was more generous, as he chuckled and poked an oddly hair-free ankle out of the side of the duvet.  He looked at it thoughtfully, turning his foot from side to side.

"Guess it does look a bit odd."

His habit of taking stick on the chin, indulging his tormentor with a laugh, would be annoying if it wasn't endearing.  Steve pressed on.

"It looks like you've constantly got white socks on.  Which is quite the look with flip flops."

Chris guffawed at that.

"I'm a style icon, clearly."

"All the kids in Shoreditch'll be doing it before long."

Chris smiled the smile of a man on whom the reference to Shoreditch hipsters was lost but was too polite to mention it, and soon the foot of the scrutinised limb met with hotel carpet, the other joining it as he swung himself upright and stretched both arms above his head.  As Chris blinked into full wakefulness, one hand coming to rest on the discarded duvet, the other idly scratching his right ear, Steve was distracted from his quest across the bathroom for goop-absorbing loo roll by the sheer unflustered nakedness of his teammate.  So much indeed that foot met goop momentarily, and there was a terrifying moment of Bambi On Ice before he steadied himself on the sink and styled it out heroically.

_He won't have noticed.  He was blinking sleepily at the wall the last time you looked at him.  Ogled him.  Oh crikey.  Don't look up.  Oops._

Chris's shoulders were shaking, his mouth closed and his pale blue eyes shining as the laugh bubbled up and escaped.  He stood, seeking out jogging bottoms discarded in haste the night before.  A sudden, welcome flash of a memory hit Steve square in the sternum as Chris picked up a pair, judging their length against his legs to figure out if they were his.  The feeling of Chris's sigh against his lips as he hooked his thumbs under that waistband just hours before.  The feeling of warm skin on warm skin, the safety and familiarity of these secret moments that had punctuated their years of friendship.

It had started with that under 19's World Cup; two wide-eyed, soft-hearted state school kids in kits two sizes too big, trying to cope away from home.  Observing the rambunctious, confident private school lads with a mixture of wonder and unease.  Trying not to stagger forward when slapped heartily on the back.  Retreating to the safety of a shared hotel room with contraband chocolate and football on the telly.  And the emotional rollercoaster of the sudden elation of a new friendship blossoming followed by the terrible anxiety of the realisation that you're achingly hard beneath the covers every morning not because you're a horny teenage boy having dreams about girls, but because your roommate doesn't bother to dress before he gets out of bed.

Never a word spoken, just as it had been all those years ago when Chris had caught him staring and slipped into Steve's single bed one early morning rather than heading to the bathroom.  Last night like every time, the familiar knock at his hotel room door.  A meaningful smile, blue eyes meeting brown with understanding.  A need to be close, to feel something on those endless beige hotel room evenings, to recapture the undamaged simplicity of those early tours by obliterating everything except pleasure and human contact.  Hands, lips, tongues exploring.  Bodies pressed together.  Desire readily apparent, insistent against each others' thighs.  Clothes grasped at, bunched up, discarded.  Hands over mouths and lips painfully bitten in an attempt to remain undetected by neighbouring teammates as they collapsed against each other, sweating, shaking, affectionate.  It was so unlike either of them, the steady, sensible members of any team.  And that was part of what made them keep doing it.

They had never defined it, and there wasn't really a need to.  Although Steve did wonder if Chris had to push away the same little niggles of heartache while drinking his coffee alone in those still mornings after a tour ended, or if he ever spent five minutes adding and deleting a kiss at the end of a WhatsApp message.  But more than anything it was just nice.  Uncomplicated.  Leave the angst to Anderson, Steve would often think, as an image of Jimmy stalked through his mind with a face like thunder and the bearing of a wronged character in a period drama.

"You need a bit of help there, bud?"

Steve realised that while he had been reminiscing, one foot was slipping quietly away, threatening to turn him into a human approximation of a giraffe drinking from a watering hole.

"You can stop distracting me with your nakedness, for a start."

He didn't really mean that.  Steve could quite happily have been distracted by Chris's nakedness all day, and felt a little pang of disappointment as navy blue fabric was pulled over lean, muscular limbs and an arse that had become way too pinchable for its own good in recent times.

Steve wobbled violently as his left leg made a bid for freedom from the rest of his body.  A terrible vision of having to sit out the final day with concussion, having beaned himself on the sink in his hotel room, and how that was so very much a Steven Finn thing to do, shot through his mind as he flailed.  Suddenly, there were hands on hands, pulling him forward into a stumble, then hands on shoulders, for a wonderful moment steadying, then rosy cheeks and big blue eyes shining with mirth and for a glorious moment lips on lips.  Steve leaned in for more.  And then, out of the blue, a hand flat against his chest, right where the tenderness of the memory of last night still rested.  A gentle shove, making him slide slowly backwards, coming to a graceful stop as his bottom came to rest against the sink, the porcelain cool through his underwear.  Chris stood at the doorway to the bathroom, chuckling as he reached for his t-shirt, eyes sparkling, cheeks rosy from kisses and mischief.

"Sorry, Steve..."  he looked up, his face apologetic, eyes still amused, "Too easy."

Chris reached into the bathroom and grabbed a towel, throwing it down over the slippiest section of tile, a fluffy white exit route to safety.  He did a theatrical bow, bending low as if beckoning the Queen onto a red carpet.  Steve stepped gratefully into the bedroom, scrunching his toes into the carpet and gathering Chris into his arms as he straightened up.

"I'll get you for this, Woakes."  said Steve, holding on tight as Chris giggled and squirmed, doing his best to look peeved and not really succeeding.

"I'll look forward to it." Chris mumbled against his lips.  A smiling kiss from the smiling voice, and with that he was gone, silently padding down the corridor to his own room, closing the door carefully so as not to attract attention.  Normality resumed for Steve, but as he prepared for a long day of test cricket, there was a spring in his step and hair gel in his ankle hair.

\---

The idea came to Steve half way through their post-match interview, as Chris was rambling on modestly about how lovely it was to get the win at dear old Edgbaston with his old mate Finny.  Steve was giddy from the late afternoon sun and the promise of cold beer to come, from the pleasurable exhaustion of a day where he'd bowled well, from the victory so thrillingly grabbed from the jaws of defeat.  He felt the grin spreading across his face like hair gel across a bathroom floor.

\---

"I'm scandalised!" Chris exclaimed with mock horror as they wandered back across the pitch to the pavilion.

"So is your dedicated following of mums and teenage girls."

Chris huffed and folded his arms across his chest, gamely attempting a pout.

"Right, that's it, forget post-match drinks.  I'm going straight to M&S to pick out the least sexy pair of stripy old man pyjamas I can find.  And then I'm going to put them on.  Forever."

Chris shook his head and grinned at Steve as he set off to the boundary to sign an autograph for a kid in a Bears top that was hollering his name.

"Oops." said Steven Finn quietly.


End file.
